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Over and over again we hear of tragedies that might have been averted if only people had access to quality mental health care. The Daily Beast does an excellent job of covering the latest such tragedy involving Gus Deeds stabbing his father, Virginia politician Creigh Deeds. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch Gus Deeds did receive a psychiatric evaluation on Monday, the day before the stabbing, but was release due to lack of a psychiatric bed across the entire western Virginia region.

In Tennessee the department of mental health is evaluating their budget for the next several years...

The Network for Public Health Law outlines a unique opportunity for consumers, families, and advocates to bring attention to local mental health needs. Every nonprofit hospital is required to participate. Chances are there’s a nonprofit hospital—and a chance to be involved—near you!

The majority of American hospitals are recognized as nonprofit organizations under state and federal law. This permits them to receive a number of financial benefits, including an exemption from the federal income tax. Many states and municipalities also provide nonprofit hospitals with exemptions from property, sales, and other taxes. This favorable tax treatment comes with the responsibility that these hospitals provide certain benefits to the communities they serve.

Community Health Needs Assessment

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) contains a provision that requires each nonprofit hospital to conduct an assessment of the health needs of its community in order to better understand and help meet those needs. This assessment, known as a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) must be conducted every three years and made widely available to the public. Groups and individuals working in, or advocating for, mental health may take advantage of the CHNA to collaborate with hospitals to help determine whether mental health is a health need for the community.

When conducting the CHNA, the nonprofit hospital is required to collect input from people who “represent the broad interests of the community served” by each hospital facility. Under proposed IRS rules, the hospital must take into account input from the following sources, among others:

at least one state, local, tribal, or regional governmental public health department with knowledge, information, or expertise relevant to the health needs of that community;

members of medically underserved, low-income, and minority populations in the community, or individuals or organizations serving or representing the interests of such populations; and

written comments received on the hospital facility’s most recently conducted CHNA and most recently adopted implementation strategy.

Walk into a community behavioral health or health center right now and you’ll probably see posters about this great new health care approach called integration. What is integration, though? And what does it look like?

As our health care system strives to improve patient health outcomes, improve the quality of care, and make care affordable, a collective light bulb has gone off. To achieve these three aims—known by the phrase “the triple aim”—we have to recognize and treat people’s physical and emotional health, and that means changing how we deliver care. Integration is one approach receiving a lot of attention for its promise to achieve these aims.

When my friends and family ask what integration is, I explain it like this: Integration improves access to mental health and addictions treatment by making that care a routine part of a visit to primary care, whether at the lowest level of integration (improved communication among providers) or the highest (a merged practice that includes both medical and mental health services). Integration also improves the quality of recovery by addressing the physical health care needs of people with mental illnesses and addictions.

In 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives recognized the need to bring attention to issues around mental health awareness among, and mental health care for, the nation’s minority communities. To further those issues, the House passed a resolution in support of Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (with the open enrollment period beginning on October 1, 2013) should help address one of the issues outlined in the resolution: the fact that many minority mental health consumers are underinsured or uninsured, and thus receive a diagnosis late in their illness, if at all.

But what about the other issues?

Top 5 Issues Related to Minority Mental Health

Here are Care for Your Mind’s top 5 issues related to minority mental health awareness that remain to be addressed. (All quotes are from the text of the resolution.)

Disproportionate access to services:“adult Caucasians who suffer from depression or an anxiety disorder are more likely to receive treatment than adult African Americans with the same disorders even though the disorders occur in both groups at about the same rate, when taking into account socioeconomic factors”

Provider-Related ChallengesIn Tuesday’s Expert Perspective, Ron Manderscheid outlined three common kinds of challenges to accessing mental health care: insurance-related, provider-related, and distance-related challenges. Yesterday we heard from Jennifer, who experienced the first of these roadblocks, and tomorrow we’ll hear yet another story from someone who experienced these barriers first-hand.

Today’s story is from Doug. His provider-related challenges may sound familiar to you: he was denied access to quality care because a provider stopped seeing individuals on Medicare.

Ron Mandersheid, Ph.D. Executive Director, NACBHDD

On the May 1 “Access to Care” post, we asked, “If you or a family member needed care today for a mental health or substance use condition, would you be able to get it?”

Access to care can help prevent, delay, and treat mood disorders, other mental conditions, and co-occurring illnesses among the 45.6 million adults and 15.6 million children and youths who experience a mental health condition.

However, in reality:

Fewer than 40% of adults and youths with mental health conditions—including mood disorders—ever get any mental health services

Fewer than 7% of adults with co-occurring mental and substance use disorders get treatment for both.

Latest Post

We know that when young people are in distress they commonly turn to friends for help and support. We decided to try to figure out how to use this idea more effectively.

The background
Central to JED’s work is our Comprehensive Approach, which includes (1) taking actions to identify those in a community who may be at risk and (2) supporting efforts to increase help-seeking among those in distress. We continuously seek to educate young people about mental health problems as well as how they can respond effectively to these problems when either they or a friend experience them. We needed answers to these questions: